The FT reports this morning that: Only one in 12 of the UK’s family-owned companies has plans to expand aggressively over the next five years, suggesting they could struggle to compete against their more dynamic foreign competitors. The survey that supports the report was undertaken by PWC. As they noted: only 16 per cent of Read the Rest…

I am a regular critic of the Oxford Centre for Business Taxation, and I think with very good reason, but I also give credit where credit is due, and this Centre has published a new report which is welcome because it supports an argument that I have put forward some time, which is that large Read the Rest…

There’s a second article from Jesse Drucker in Bloomberg today. It reports: Over the past three years, Pfizer Inc. was an earner without profit in its own country. The maker of the cholesterol medication Lipitor, the world’s top-selling prescription drug, reported almost half its revenues in the U.S. for 2007 through 2009, while booking domestic Read the Rest…

I have been asked to do a video on transfer pricing. Actually, I did, a couple of years or so ago (I can tell from the glasses). So rather than repeat the operation, here it is, with apologies to the several thousand who seem to have watched it in the meantime:

I’ve been asked: In your view, is there any room for legitimate “tax planning”? In a “perfect” world what would the role of the tax profession be? Sorry if this has been previously dealt with, as I said in the other post, I am quite new to your blog. My answer is an emphatic ‚Äòyes’. Read the Rest…

Budget 2009: £3bn raid on top earners’ pensions buried in small print – Telegraph. If those 1% or so on the highest level of earnings, who benefited most from the economic boom that prceded the credit crunch and recession are not going to pay most for it, who is? There’s an incredible poverty of thinking Read the Rest…

AccountingWeb has an article in which it is claimed that 95% of accountants may be negligent with regard to tax planning because they do not tell all their clients of all the tax planning schemes that might be available to them. I think that an absurd suggestion and have said so on that site, saying: Read the Rest…

The Times has reported this morning that: Some of Britain’s biggest listed companies, including several that have threatened to redomicile abroad, paid little or no corporation tax in Britain in 2007. Research by The Times shows that FTSE-100 companies – Cadbury, Standard Chartered and British American Tobacco, which have a combined market capitalisation of £75 Read the Rest…

It’s a fact that we cannot do without taxes. That’s because we cannot do without government. And we cannot do without markets either, at least in the world as we know it. The relationship is symbiotic: governments provide the structure in which markets can work: markets need government as their insurer of last resort: populations Read the Rest…